India's Urban System: Sustainability and Imbalanced Growth of Cities

sustainability Article India’s Urban System: Sustainability and Imbalanced Growth of Cities Abdul Shaban 1,* , Karima Kourtit 2,3,4,5,6,7 and Peter Nijkamp 2,3,4,7 1 School of Development of Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Deonar, Mumbai-400088, India 2 Center for European Studies, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, 700505 Iasi, Romania; [email protected] (K.K.); [email protected] (P.N.) 3 Business Management Department, Open University (OU), 6411 CR Heerlen, The Netherlands 4 School of Architecture, Planning & Design, Polytecnic University, Ben Guerir 43150, Morocco 5 Department of Social and Economic Geography, Uppsala University, 75120 Uppsala, Sweden 6 Centre for the Future of Places (CFP), KTH Royal Institute of Technology, SE-10044 Stockholm, Sweden 7 Geography and Spacial Management, Adam Mickiewicz University, 61680 Poznan, Poland * Correspondence: [email protected]; Tel.: +91-9819145571 Received: 9 March 2020; Accepted: 1 April 2020; Published: 7 April 2020 Abstract: This paper maps out the structure and relative dynamics of cities of various size classes in India. It aims to address their hierarchical distribution, by employing the rank-size rule, Gibrat’s law, and a primacy index. The implications of urban concentrations for GDP, banking system, FDI, civic amenities, and various urban externalities (such as pollution and spatial exclusion) are also examined. It shows that India’s urban system, though it follows the rank-size rule, is huge and top-heavy. It follows also Gibrat’s law of proportionate growth. Although India’s cities collectively account for less than one third of the total population, they command more than three fourths of the country’s GDP. Megacities have become congested, clogged, polluted, and also show significant social polarization. There is a gridlock situation for the cities, inhibiting their potential for becoming effective economic and social change sites. The top-heavy character of India’s urban system also adversely impacts the balanced regional development of the country. Keywords: urbanization; imbalanced growth; hierarchical distribution; rank-size rule; Gibrat’s law; primacy index 1. Introduction According to population studies by the United Nations, the human geography in our world has entered a new epoch, namely, the ‘urban century’. The city—or in a more general sense, the urban agglomeration—has become increasingly the geographic orientation point or magnet of human activity. The city has become the natural economic habitat of people, the ‘home of man’ [1]. Today, more than 50% of the world population lives in urban areas. The turning point took place around 2008, when for the first time in human history, more than 50% of the world’s population (about 3.3 billion) started living in urban areas [2]. Whereas in the Global North, this transformation had already taken place in the twentieth century, the Global South is entering the urban revolution in the 21st century. It is estimated that by 2030, about 5 billion people will be city dwellers, out of which more than 80% will be from developing countries. In the meantime, during the period of 2000 to 2030, the urban population of Asia and Africa will double from 1.7 billion to 3.4 billion [2]. Given the expected positive association between urbanization and economic growth, it is plausible that this transformation to an urban age offers the Global South a unique opportunity for economic development and to improve quality of life for a large share of its deprived population. However, the success of this development will largely depend on how the Global South is able to design, govern, and manage its cities for these strategic ends. Sustainability 2020, 12, 2941; doi:10.3390/su12072941 www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability Sustainability 2020, 12, 2941 2 of 20 India is one of the major emerging economies of the Global South, after China. The country has a long history of unbalanced urbanization [3]. Like many other countries of the Global South, it is undergoing an urban revolution. Its cities are experiencing a massive growth of population. However, a significant share of its population still lives in poverty and substandard conditions. The ongoing urban revolution offers the country a great opportunity for economic, social, and ecological transformation so as to emerge as a developed country [4]. However, it has been argued by many researchers that Indian urbanization may be unsustainable, as it is largely unmanaged [4–7]. The challenges of unsustainability surround the Indian cities at multiple levels. First, the urban system is dominated by a few large cities, clustered in the western flank of India, with huge implications for balanced regional development. Second, large cities control a significant share of the Indian economy, the propulsive industries, and new economic opportunities. Third, a majority of cities in India face hard challenges related to housing, transport, electricity, water supply, pollution, and congestion. Fourth, internally, most cities are also marked by significant social exclusion, crime, and violence. Fifth, the government policies to tackle the urban challenges and to avail the emerging opportunities have been lackadaisical and, in many ways, irrelevant to solve pressing problems. In this context, the present paper attempts: (a) To examine India’s urban system in terms of the hierarchical distribution of cities; (b) to analyze the concentration of economic resources in cities and how this distribution is shaped by megacities; (c) to understand the housing, water, transport, and related ecological challenges in Indian cities; and (d) to examine the social exclusion, specifically, religious exclusion. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section2 presents a review of the relevant literature, while Section3 examines the urban system of India by examining the size-class distribution of cities, using the Rank-Size Rule method, Gibrat’s law of proportionate growth and the primacy index. Next, Section4 focusses on the metropolitanization of the Indian economy through a concentration of economy, bank credits, bank deposits, credit-deposit ratios, and foreign direct investments, while Section5 examines the issues related to governance, housing, water, transport, and related ecological challenges. Section6 addresses the social exclusion in Indian cities, while Section7 concludes the paper. 2. Setting the Context Cities are not islands, but part of a broader interactive spatial fabric. They have an internal structure and dynamics (e.g., morphology, density, share of public vs. private space), but are also subjected to external driving forces (e.g., economic competition, nodal position in a spatial network). The conceptualization and analysis of cities has followed two streams of approaches, namely, location and agglomeration theory [8–10] and urban systems theory [11–13]. Various hypotheses have been launched in the course of history to understand and explain the complex patterns and dynamics of cities and their hinterland, such as central place theory, spatial dominance theory, core-periphery theory, differential urbanization, and so forth [14]. But most publications were retrospective in nature, and did not foresee the unprecedented dynamics in urbanization which led to the current ‘urban century’. To understand the ‘age of the city’—or the ‘New Urban World’ [15]—the attention has to be focused on key elements in the force field of modern cities. These are: The city as a collective magnet for a great diversity of economic activities (‘urban buzz’ [16]), • caused by the efficiency-enhancing constellation of a city (appropriate infrastructure, market information and access, etc.) The city as an externality-driven economic organism that is attracting business and people, as • a result of scale and agglomeration advantages (supply of educational facilities, presence of suppliers, etc. [17]). The city as a concentration of social capital or as a ‘melting pot’ [18] of culturally or socially • diversified groups. The city as a powerful political and economic node in a network of cities, a position referred to as • ‘urban empire’ in [19]. Sustainability 2020, 12, 2941 3 of 20 The city as an ever-expanding power-block, which reinforces its position to the detriment of towns • and villages in its hinterland [20]. The above sketch of the contemporaneous position of cities in our world has to be placed in the perspective of the dynamics of modern settlement systems. Two constituents in the complex force field of cities have to be mentioned here, namely, natural growth and migration. Both factors play a critical role in the rise in urbanization, in particular in the developing world. Current statistics show an unprecedented rise in urban growth in countries in the emerging and developing world. Especially Latin-American, African, and Asian countries witness a historically unique increase in urbanization, with two particular features: (i) Medium-sized and large cities turn into ever expanding large cities (including mega-cities with more than 10 million inhabitants); (ii) the number of medium-sized and large cities is increasing even faster. This so-called double urbanization is one of the striking characteristics of the New Urban World [15]. Consequently, the relative share of villages and small cities is decreasing; they tend to become a ‘minority’. This decline in importance of rural or peripheral settlements tends to erode their public amenities (cultural provisions, education, health care systems, etc.), which

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